A day after Feras Hamdan pleaded guilty to a series of misdemeanors stemming from a road rage incident with Rep. Max Miller last June, the 36-year-old Westlake doctor filed a lawsuit claiming the Ohio Congressman defamed him in media and criminal proceedings over the past eight months.
On Wednesday, his attorneys detailed their case in a civil complaint alleging that Miller’s social media posts and public statements in the aftermath of the incident —including his narrative to Rocky River police and posts later on Twitter/X — harmed Hamdan’s reputation and run contrary to facts.
On the morning of June 19, Hamdan spotted Miller’s black RAM 1500 TRX while both were driving on I-90. Hamdan, whose family hails from Palestine and who lost cousins in the Israel-Hamas War, recognized Miller.
He took out his phone to record, according to evidence and Hamdan’s account of the events.
“This is the congressman, that piece of shit, fucking congressman that’s against Palestine—that’s crazy,” Hamdan says in a video recording of the incident.
“That racist, Jewish—he can’t event look at me,” Hamdan says as Miller turns his head in the driver’s seat. “He knows I’m recording him!” Hamdan pulled up a Palestinian flag on his phone and showed it to Miller.
Miller painted a different story of what happened. In a 911 call, Miller detailed a “full Palestinian guy” who “cut [him] off,” “flipped [him] off” and “said he wanted to kill me and my daughter, verbatim.”
Hamdan “rolled down his window and said that I’m going to cut your throat and your daughter’s,” Miller says in the 911 call. “He said, ‘You’re a dirty Jew, I’m going to fucking kill you all, and I know who you are and where you live.”
The next day, Hamdan was arrested by Rocky River police and held on a $500,000 bond. On July 8, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office charged him with a handful of felonies and misdemeanors—including disorderly conduct, menacing, ethnic intimidation and disregard of safety on highways.
Evidence collected from Hamdan’s Tesla, ODOT cameras, and expert witness testimony poked holes in some of the allegations. County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley eventually agreed to a deal that saw Hamdan plead guilty to three misdemeanors, including reckless driving and disorderly conduct. He’s to serve a year of probation and 100 hours of community service. He gets to keep his medical license.
Pete Pattakos, one of Hamdan’s lawyers, alleges procedural errors and lasting defamation based on what Miller claimed versus the evidence from the criminal proceedings.
Data subpoenaed from Tesla proved that Hamdan’s windows were down during the duration of the highway interaction with Miller, Pattakos said, meaning any words shouted at highway speeds between the two cars would have been “scrambled and unintelligible.” And ODOT footage and Hamdam’s steering wheel movements were “inconsistent with any effort to swerve or run Miller off the road.”
After the suit was filed, O’Malley hinted Hamdan was lucky to be allowed to still practice medicine. And his defamation suit, he said, “may backfire and cost Dr. Hamdan the gift he was just given.”
The issues are far more grave, Hamdan’s attorney said.
“It’s all very chilling. It’s unconstitutional,” Pattakos told Scene. “It’s a violation of my client’s First Amendment rights.”
“This just shows the increasing power that prosecutors have to destroy peoples lives,” he added. “They have prosecutorial immunity.”
Larry Zukerman, Miller’s lawyer, did not respond to a call for comment Wednesday morning.
“Clearly he [pleaded] guilty because he was in fact guilty,” Zukerman told Cleveland.com, noting he intends to file a counterclaim against Hamdan’s alleged “outrageous, antisemitic conduct.”
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